Page 97 of The Ghost of You

“Well you wouldn’t have done it if I told you. Besides, it was just a precaution. The owners of this land are ready to keel over. They don’t drive the perimeter often anymore.”

I’m skeptical. “How do you know this?”

She shrugs. “I just do.”

I look at her and contemplate calling this whole thing off but there is a pleading in her eyes and I know this is important to her.

I turn the car back on and listen to her as I drive a few more minutes into the lush five-foot grass around us. I hope this trail holds and we don’t sink into the marsh.

“You can pull over here,” she says as she points to a solid looking area. She gets out of the car again and this time I follow.

There is a narrow path that runs along the edge of the woods and the marsh. But I can see a clearing up ahead. As we make our way to it I nearly stumble when we come across a huge field of daisies. “Wow.”

She turns back toward me with a smile on her face. The sunlight is hitting her nose causing her freckles to stand out. “It’s beautiful, isn’t it?”

“How the hell did you find this place?” I ask as I move next to her.

“We were kids. Kyle, Becca, and I. We spent a week every summer at his grandparents’ house.”

I raise a brow at her.

“Yes, this is their land. That’s how I know it’s okay. They would never kick me out.”

She bends down to pick a handful of daisies. Her fingers trailing over the petals of the flowers with a soft caress. “When Kyle and I were older, he begged me to come here with him. I thought he just wanted to have dinner with his grandparents, but he took me to this field instead. It’s where he finally confessed he had feelings for me. Beyond friendship. We had been making music for years but it was just after spring break our sophomore year, when we got serious about our band.

“We came back here often to sit in the field or next to the creek in the woods. He said our love could withstand anything. Like these daises. They grow no matter the temperature or the wind or whatever element might destroy them. He said our love would do the same.”

She stands up and looks at me with a sadness in her eyes. A lone tear falls down her cheek and I swipe it away with my thumb. She leans into me for a brief second before she pulls away.

I follow her as she walks into the woods on the same path we walked down earlier. A hundred feet in a narrow creek flows through the woods and a rickety wooden bridge stands above it. She sits down and gestures for me to sit next to her. There is barely room for both of us and I worry this won’t hold my weight.

She must see my hesitation. “Don’t worry, it’s strong enough.”

I sit next to her as she takes off her shoes. She lets her feet kick through the water that must be ice cold but she doesn’t flinch. She picks a flower off a stem and throws it into the stream.

“It was a week before the wedding. My dream wedding. A winter wedding. And even though we were in Georgia everything was working out how I wanted. There was snow in the forecast for our wedding day. I was cleaning up the dishes from dinner when Kyle said we had to talk. God, I remember being so scared. His voice had that tone you get when you are breaking up with someone. And I didn’t want to be that girl, the one who got broken up with the week before her wedding. How selfish I was to think that.

“That was when he told me he made a mistake. He slept with someone else. I stood there staring at him, speechless. I was so angry, Noah. So fucking angry. I threw the freshly cleaned dishes at him. We argued about everything. I don’t even remember half of it. Anything that pissed us off we fought over. Then he blamed me for why he cheated on me. He said he was mad over my inability to focus on anything but the music. I told him it was our thing. He told me I turned it into my thing. He didn’t want to play music anymore. He hadn’t for a while. He said I was never going to make a living from it. That we couldn’t afford to live the life he wanted as musicians. He said I wouldn’t listen anytime he brought it up, he couldn’t get through to me. So he found his consolation in someone else.

“I didn’t know what to say after that. I watched him walk out the front door, slamming it behind him. I watched from the window as he drove off. I was so angry with him. I opened a bottle of tequila and got shitfaced and passed out. I woke up to a knocking on my door. It was the police. There had been an accident.”

I wrap my arm around her shoulders as she lets out a deep breath and throws the last of the daisies into the water.

“I never even found out who it was. Who was able to give him what I couldn’t? I guess it doesn’t matter.”

She grabs the rings around her neck as a few tears fall. “I hate myself for getting angry with him. If I hadn’t, maybe we could have talked it out.”

“You can’t be angry with yourself for his death.”

“I know. But it’s always easy to think about what could’ve been. Who knows, maybe he would have left me either way.” She pauses as she throws the flower stems into the creek. “I think I am mostly angry at him for destroying it all. Our wedding, our future, our music.”

As I listen to her talk suddenly everything makes sense. Why she hates winter, the rings around her neck, the new daisy tattoo every year. I am a fool for thinking we could do this. Have a relationship. This right here is the reason we can’t. She hasn’t moved past losing her fiancé. She won’t be able to move on until she gets closure and I am not sure she ever will. She told me she wouldn’t be like Claire but how can I trust that to be true?

I can’t put my heart on the line again. I can’t risk losing everything again. And with every day I spend with her my heart falls more and more.

These feelings I have for her are strong. Are they strong enough for me to get through this with her? Or will she end up leaving me too when she can’t move through her own past?

“You are the only person who knows by the way. No one knew about the affair. I couldn’t find it in myself to tell anyone. Let our friends and family know he was a liar and cheater. So I kept it a secret. From everyone.”

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